Friday, March 29, 2013

The American Solar Energy Society will be hosting Solar 2013 from April 17th (Wed) to the 20th (Sat) at the Baltimore Convention Center.

Technical sessions are held from April 17th to April 19th and the exhibition hall will be open on April 18th & 19th. A detailed schedule is available here: http://www.ases.org/solar2013/On Saturday the 20th the exhibit hall will be open to the public. There will also be a number of forums and workshops on various issues, including how to go solar, solar bulk purchases, and how to develop a community-owned project.

So put the date on your calendar! We'll pass on more info about the public day as it becomes available.

Non-profit company PS and Trans Value will construct and operate the plant, using 7,500 of Kyocera’s multicrystalline silicon solar modules, and capital donated by Ryukoku University.

The 1.85MW Ryukoku solar park, currently being developed by Trans Value, Inami Town and Ryukoku University, will generate electricity for sale to the local grid, under Japan’s generous feed in tariff (FiT) scheme. The profits – any revenue left after operating costs - will be donated to social projects in the Wakayama Prefecture and Kyoto areas.The partners also hope to establish a model that will encourage a wider take up of renewables.

The new project will be located at various locations throughout the region, with 50kW at the Ryukoku University Fukakusa campus in Kyoto City, and the rest in two locations in Inami Town, Wakayama Prefecture. Around 1.2MW will be on leased municipal property Inami Town, and an addition 600kW on land owned by PS in the town.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

What began as a group of neighbors hoping to reduce their impact on global warming has since become a major force for solar advocacy in Washington, DC. The Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative was started by two teenage boys who wanted to make solar power convenient and affordable through a bulk-purchase program. Along the way, the cooperatives new members realized that buying power wasn’t enough, and sought out changes in the district’s energy policies. Today the Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative has helped to get solar panels on over 10 percent of the homes in the Mount Pleasant Neighborhood and has grown into a city-wide political organization.

Monday, March 25, 2013

There’s a lot of debate these days about the future of solar power. Certain news media outlets who must not be named have brought renewed attention to the issue, likely confusing the public further. I’m here to tell you that solar IS our future. Why? In addition to being an important part of fighting climate change, solar makes financial sense, creates jobs, is abundant, and enjoys widesprSead popular support.
Solar makes financial sense

“Wait,” I hear you say, “Isn’t solar just too expensive?” There are so many ways to answer with that, but they all lead to “No, get with the times.” The perception that solar is too expensive is outdated. The current reality:

Costs may go down even further if the DOE’s SunShot Initiative succeeds in lowering soft costs, such as permitting and financing. Lower soft costs have helped Germany top the U.S. in installations despite having much less sun.

Many areas have already achieved grid parity, where unsubsidized solar power is on par with or cheaper than retail electricity prices. That’s expected to spread to many more regions in the coming decade:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu agrees -- in fact, he believes solar is close to being as cheap as any other power source: “This is not something that’s going to happen 20-30 years from today. This is going to happen 10 years from today. Maybe sooner.”

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Off-grid renewable energy is the future, and village communities are increasingly charting the way forward and assuming lead over cities, which are consuming alarming proportions of fossil fuel-derived energy

About 75 million of India’s 226 million households (400 million people) have no access to power. In rural areas the electrification rate is 47.5 per cent. This has an adverse cascading effect on human health, economic development and political stability. The efforts towards ensuring equitable growth and securing the marginalised are also compromised. The way out can be decentralised energy solutions that rely on the progressive renewable energy alternatives.

Clean energy generation for rural areas is gaining ground with biomass-powered energy, community solar power plants, methane and wind-powered energy alternatives. The availability of locally generated renewable energy has the potential of fostering confidence in the local community and help achieve growth in sustainable livelihoods.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The province launched its first community renewable energy projects today.

Premier Darrell Dexter joined Energy Minister Charlie Parker, representatives from Seaforth Energy and municipal officials in Stellarton to mark the event. The province commissioned six 50-kilowatt turbines, including three in Goldboro, two in Tatamagouche and one in New Glasgow.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) issued an Order yesterday calling for several changes to its model interconnection tariff for distributed generation. The DPU adopted most of the consensus recommendations suggested by the Distributed Generation Working Group (DGWG) in its September 2012 report and red-lined tariff. More details.

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Inc. (IREC) promoted many of the changes adopted by the DPU through its public comments and its participation in the DGWG in an advisory role. IREC commends the efforts of the DPU and the DGWG, which should encourage even more renewable energy growth in Massachusetts.

In recent years, the Commonwealth has seen a huge surge of interconnection applications, which shows no signs of slowing down as interest in renewable energy continues to grow. The revised interconnection procedures adopted yesterday should allow these applications to be processed more efficiently, and more renewable energy projects to come online.

“Massachusetts’ revised interconnection tariff represents a major improvement,” said Erica Schroeder of Keyes, Fox & Wiedman LLP who represents IREC. “Overall its requirements are more clear and transparent, and more appropriate for the high volume of interconnection applications that Massachusetts is seeing.”

The changes adopted by the DPU touch on various parts of Massachusetts’ interconnection process, from before an application is submitted through the issuance of the interconnection agreement and construction.

For example, the DPU has approved a mandatory pre-application report for projects larger than 500 kilowatts. The pre-application report should help applicants prioritize among potential locations and configurations. In addition, it should reduce the number of speculative applications that have bogged down the interconnection process in the past.

The updated Massachusetts tariff also includes several improvements to the technical screens for the simplified and expedited processes, which allow certain projects to move more quickly through to interconnection.

A more robust and transparent supplemental review process is another critical improvement in the new tariff. Supplemental review allows projects that fail the Simplified and Expedited Screens to still interconnect without full study. To do so, these projects must pass the three supplemental review screens, which ensure that the project will not affect the safety and reliability of the grid.

This improved supplemental review process should save both utilities and renewable developers time and money by avoiding unnecessary study. It should also allow more projects to interconnect more quickly, while still supporting a healthy grid.

The DPU cited a number of open issues for stakeholders to pursue with respect to interconnection going forward, including the development of a group study process to study multiple, related applications concurrently. IREC agrees that this is a critical issue to resolve in Massachusetts and plans to participate in the development of an effective group study process.

Another task that the DPU identified is to determine the appropriate penetration screen for Supplemental Review. The DPU adopted the more conservative option in its order yesterday—67 percent of minimum load—but required the new Technical Standards Review Group to spend the next year considering whether or not to increase the screen up to 100 percent of minimum load.

“Using 100 percent of minimum load as the penetration screen in supplemental review is an emerging best practice nationally, as we’ve seen, for example, in California and Hawaii,” said Schroeder. “IREC hopes that Massachusetts will join these other states as a renewable energy leader and adopt the 100-percent screen.”

By February 2014, the new Technical Standards Review Group must provide a proposal regarding the supplemental review penetration screen to the DPU. IREC plans to provide input in the development of this proposal.

In the meantime, Massachusetts utilities must file updated individual tariffs in accordance with the revised tariff within 30 days of the order. They must implement all non-tariffed changes adopted by the order immediately.

About IREC

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Inc. (IREC) is a non-profit organization accelerating the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency since 1982. Its programs and policies lead to easier, more affordable connection to the utility grid; fair credit for renewable energy produced; best practices for states, municipalities, utilities and industries. IREC is a respected resource and national leader in quality assessment, workforce development, consumer protection and stakeholder coordination. Since 2005, IREC has provided a foundation for the growing clean energy workforce through the credentialing of trainers and training programs and through the development of quality standards. For more information, visit http://www.irecusa.org.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

3D printing has the potential to do for manufacturing what the PC did for computing and what the solar panel is doing for energy. The ability to make things is becoming a commodity, available to many at low cost, decentralized, with innovation democratized. Depending on how it is implemented, the technology could either increase or reduce energy usage and waste. The production of energy and the making of things can both be close to the point of use. No matter how it unfolds, the renewable revolution will be 3D printed.

Efficiency and Waste

Any new technology these days is going to undergo life-cycle cost analysis (LCA) to determine its degree of sustainability. Of particular concern are energy efficiency and the material streams involved. A 3D printer will typically use heat to melt or fuse the raw material to build the object. In some cases the process can use much more energy than traditional methods - Ecomagination reports: "Mechanical engineer Tim Gutowski, who heads MIT’s Environmentally Benign Manufacturing
group, found in a 2009 study that laser direct metal deposition — a
type of additive manufacturing where metal powder is deposited and fused
together by a high-energy beam — uses hundreds of times the
electricity, per kilogram of metal processed, as more traditional
methods like casting or machining." Solar thermal technology can provide the heat needed, as in this crude but elegant method using a fresnel lens.

There is also the question of where the raw material comes from, and where it goes. If it's cheap to make objects, a lot more junk than we already have could wind up being made (though that's somehow hard to imagine.) One could use something tremendously abundant, like sand, a byproduct of another process, like sawdust, or something we'd otherwise throw away, like old plastic bottles. When automation brings manufacturing back to America's shores (without most the jobs), we can recycle millions of shipping containers we'll no longer need, not to mention those coal cars. It's also important for us to be able to recycle whatever we print, and unprint it back into its various component parts.

3D printers can save energy, materials, and time by printing objects with a fractal interior structure (think Eiffel Tower). The larger the objects made, the bigger an advantage this is. This will revolutionize construction with girders vastly stronger than steel of the same weight, and create vastly more transportation over land, air, and sea through ultralighting.

There are many advantages in using a general-purpose machine, with fewer material inputs, to replace numerous manufacturing technologies. This provides the opportunity for single-point optimizations for greater efficiency and better recycling.

Distribution and Demand Response

3D printers can bring manufacturing closer to the consumer, with its attendant electric load. Individuals and communities can have their own machines. Along with electric vehicle charging, 3D home or neighborhood scale manufacturing could put stress on distribution and transmission grids. Urban solar power and neighborhood-scale energy storage can help alleviate these demand spikes. In the countryside, SGI has found landowners clamoring to lease their land for solar. Without some on-site demand, it is often difficult in both regulatory and technical dimensions to get the power to the load. Micromanufacturing can bring the load to where renewable power is available, in farmlands and desert, for the same reason that data centers are located next to dams.

A 3D printer can be turned on and off quickly, allowing it to turn off in times of limited power supply or high power price. Since 3D printers can make more 3D printers, it's easy to achieve an overcapacity that can absorb excess energy. In 2010, 25 Terawatt-hours of wind energy were curtailed in the United States due to lack of transmission or demand (a Terawatt-hour has a street value of about $100 million). Curtailment happens when power prices go negative - they'll pay you to take this nice, fresh renewable energy, so long as the wind is blowing at an inconvenient time of day, or the reservoirs are too full and need to discharge water through the turbines to make room for impending storms. It's a tremendous business opportunity for anyone who wants free power, especially anyone who has a fleet of trucks that currently head back empty to distribution centers.

3D printing can provide a flexible domestic manufacturing base that can use renewable energy when and where it is produced.

3D Printing of Renewable Devices

3D printers can produce solar panels, and can make anything at all wrapped in a photovoltaic coating. Any object used outdoors (or placed in the window sill) could produce its own power. 3D solar cells can be more efficient than flat panels, capturing light that would otherwise be reflected away. 3D printers can also make batteries, so anything you make can power itself. Solar thermal parts, micro-hydro turbines, wind turbines, wave power, and even thermoelectric devices for absorbing waste heat can all be printed. In short, 3D printers can make everything they need to power themselves.

Open source designs available over the Internet combined with easily replicable 3D printers will make technology transfer instantaneous. The concept of the "solar breeder" is the use of solar energy to make more solar panels - 3D printing can breed all kinds of renewables worldwide. A system with rapid energy pay-back time (say a combination of ultralight wind turbines and ultrathin solar panels) can spread exponentially and put a carbon-free energy system in place within a few years to a few decades.

The Risks

One question that has to be asked when proposing an exponentially growing system is that of the sorceror's apprentice - will you have the power to stop it when it gets big enough and further growth would be counterproductive? This is indeed the sort of problem we are facing with the current fossil powered, growth-based system. Any desert tortoise displaced by a large solar farm can tell you that a system that we'd thought of as "renewable" really isn't, when it gets too big, and begins to overwhelm ecosystems.

Exponential replication could be used to implement one of a variety of potential geoengineering schemes, such as space-based mirrors, carbon capture devices, or fake icebergs to protect the Arctic. This might save our butts from the worst effects of global warming, but with potentially severe side effects.

Another property of 3D printers is their ability to shift at any moment into (or out of) a war footing, at every scale from the U.S. military down to an individual printing out a gun. Your 3D printer could be attacked by an infected drone, which will make it print out more drones (though more likely it would just steal your designs).

The Future
Our 3D-printed future looks ultra-light, ultra-customized, ultra-efficient, and global. Renewable energy can expect a world freed from many of the constraints that keep it from growing. The flexibility and spatial distribution possible with 3D printing brings us closer to a 100% renewable civilization.

When we discuss energy storage with batteries, one question that often comes up is the energy cost of mining the metals, building and transporting the battery, and so forth. Some claim "it takes more energy to make a battery than the battery actually stores". For Lead-Acid batteries this is very nearly true, but other technologies do better, according to a Stanford study sponsored by ExxonMobil, GE, Schlumberger, and DuPont (not exactly the rose-colored glasses crowd).

This group developed a metric called "Energy Stored on Energy Invested", measuring the ratio of the amount of energy stored during the battery's life to its lifecycle energy cost. Lead-Acid batteries have and ESOI of only two (they store only twice the energy they cost to make), and Lithium-ion batteries do much better at an ESOI of 10. Both pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage (CAES) score over 200 - pumped hydro storage is restricted by geology and ecological factors, and CAES has a fairly low round-trip efficiency.

The longer a battery lasts, the more total energy it can store in its life and the higher its ESOI will be. Some Nickel-Iron batteries can last many decades, and so could score very high on such a measure. I'd be interested in the score for the new utility scale zinc-air batteries.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

LINCOLN, Nebraska —
Utility officials warned lawmakers on Tuesday that a plan for so-called
community solar gardens could increase energy costs in Nebraska, but
environmentalists said the proposal would make it easier for residents
to use solar power to provide electricity to their homes.

The proposal being considered by the Legislature's
Natural Resources Committee would allow residents to join a community
solar garden, similar to a co-op, in exchange for a credit on their
electric bills.

Why
reach for the moon, when we can go for the sun? That’s what Energy
Secretary Steven Chu aimed for in 2011, when he launched the SunShot Initiative
to improve solar technologies and reduce costs. The program’s goal: to
make solar competitive with any other power source -- without subsidies.

So
far, it seems the sun was not too lofty a target. Chu may be stepping
down as Energy Secretary, but he’s leaving on a high note with great
hopes for the future. At a recent Google Hangout
on the solar industry, he expressed his excitement about the present
and future of solar and his conviction that solar is close to being as
cheap as any other power source: “This is not something that’s going to
happen twenty to thirty years from today. This is going to happen ten
years from today, maybe sooner.”

At the Hangout, Chu and
panelists from the solar industry provided plenty of reasons to feel
good about solar’s future. They pointed to improvements on the
technological front, such as increases in the efficiency, reliability,
and longevity of systems -- similar to what we’ve seen happen with
computers. What to expect for the future: at least a decade of continued
improvements. And within that decade, Chu aims for the U.S. to be a
world leader in R&D, deployment, and manufacture of solar products.

But
there’s a lot more to what’s happening than just technological
improvements. An important part of the SunShot Initiative is tackling
“soft costs,” such as financing and permitting -- or as Chu puts it, the
“red tape and hassle factor.” Because of drops in hardware prices,
those soft costs now make up more than half the cost of installing
solar.

Friday, March 1, 2013

2013 could be the year for shared solar in the United States! Subscription model solar projects using virtual net metering (VNM) are becoming a new industry sector. Thousands of homes and businesses otherwise constrained by shade or limited space can now receive credit on their electric bills for solar power through the grid.

After the rapid growth of solar gardens in Colorado with XCEL Energy's Solar*Rewards Community program, the idea has started to catch on with utilities and citizens groups across the country, and new legislation is being introduced. I had a chance to have a conversation with Hannah Masterjohn at the Vote Solar Initiative - we cobbled together a list of active legislation in different states. For most of these states (California, DC, Maryland, and Hawaii) this is the second attempt at community solar / VNM legislation - there is a steep learning curve for legislators and advocates alike. Some fine tuning has happened as well, as more experience is gained with the model.

California - Shared Renewable Energy Self-Generation Program, SB43 - Introduced in 2012 as SB843, this bill died in the last hours of the legislative session. The new version of the bill includes provisions for low-income individuals, requires a percentage of the subscribers to be in the same county as the solar garden, and has a carve-out for solar gardens less than 1MW in size.

District of Columbia - Community Renewables Energy Act, B20-0057 - Establishes virtual net metering in the District. Projects up to 5 Megawatts with at least two subscribers are allowed. Unsubscribed energy credits will be distributed to users of the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). This bill explicitly adopts the Interstate Renewable Energy Council's (IREC's) Community Renewables Model Program Rules, which are currently being updated.

Maryland - Community Energy-Generating Facilities Pilot Program HB1128 and SB699 - Allows for biomass, solar, wind, fuel cell, or small hydropower. A three-year, 75 MW pilot program is proposed, with facilities up to 2 MW and a minimum of two subscribers.

Nebraska - Community Solar Gardens LB557 - Expands net metering to include community solar gardens up to 2 MW. Similar to the 2010 Colorado Community Solar Gardens Act in many ways, significant authority is handed to the Public Utilities Commission.Washington - Renewable Energy Incentives HB1301 - This bill would make changes to the existing community solar program in Washington state. The maximum size of 75 kilowatts remains unchanged. A clean energy fund with competitive process for incentives is established, and performance standards promulgated.

If you know of community solar legislation in states besides these, please contact joy@solargardens.org and I will add this state to the list.